Keeping tight control is a *good* think in user interface design strategy; it provides a more focused structure and simpler environment, which were their goals.
The mistake the Gnome developers made was calling the new desktop "Gnome 3". Had they presented it as an experimental new environment and named it "Project Harmony" or "Desktop Zen", or something like that, they would have stepped on less toes and met less resistance to the radical changes, and people would have seen it in better light.
Of course they would have had less audience, as distros wouldn't have adopted it so quickly. That trade-off was their choice, but I think "Linux is awesome! There are three good major desktops now!" was a better selling point than "They've updated Gnome, and it sucks".
You know, I heard that excuse a lot twenty years ago.
That's what they said twenty years after Gutenberg invented the movable type. Of course the printing press was perfect by then, there wasn't any possibility for improvement, technology hasn't advanced at all since, and books were as easy to handle then as they're now. So there's no excuse for anybody that didn't know how to read, and they should be blamed for not taking advantage of that brand new technology.
Or maybe computing technology is primitive and hard to use, and it requires years of professional training to understand?
(...I wonder where the impression that nerds are arrogant comes from?)
So you're suggesting that tablet computers are not for serious computing? Outrageous! So, maybe we should relegate them to be used for, say, amateur usage by non-experts?
GPL or CC-BY-SA content is not safe from DMCA takedown notices either. I don't see how that's relevant.
The license still.grants pretty much absolute control to the rights holder
How come? The rights holder can't control non-commercial use after he has released it. So it's "open for non-commercial use".
There is not *one* definition of open and free, the BSD-GPL license wars prove it. Sure -NC is less open than those, but it isn't necessarily closed either.
The fact remains that you will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with limited travel, when typing on a tablet's screen.
Most users I know use the "hunt and peck" technique and are unable to touch-type, so they will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with a physical keyboard. A tablet virtual keyboard thus proves no disadvantage to them.
Yes, it's legally equivalent to shareware and freeware; it's unclear whether it can be used for self-promotion where the content is not distributed for money, only for publicity; and it doesn't allow for building a corpus of open content like a fully open license would do.
However, CC-*-NC licenses allow for unlimited amateur work and redistribution, which is a step above what standard copyright allows even under free use terms. Given the "web 2.0" model of distributed content generation, that end-users can reuse the content without legal worries is a win toward freedom even if it doesn't go the extra mile and only some users can benefit from it.
Because freedom and openness are both incompatible with NC.
No, they aren't.
Seriously, I thought you should be able to defend the free/open principles with a less shallow argument than that. See my post below. Defending open content is not a binary proposition but more like a continuum; and CC-NC-SA falls inside that continuum nearer to "open" than "close".
It really depends on how you define freedom and openness. I'd say the CC-NC-SA is quite apt for the goals it promotes - that small content creators release their work to be shared and reused throughout the Internet "informal" channels.
That it doesn't offer full doesn't make it opposing open principles, it just offers a less permissive version of them; that's still promoting openness in my book. As you say, the GPL itself includes some restrictions, and even then it's held as the definition of "free and open" for many of us.
Heck, even the MIT license places restrictions on what you an do (you cannot use the names of the copyright holders, you have to copy the license notice in all versions, etc), and therefore is not "free as in freedom"; there are still things you aren't allowed to do with MIT-licensed content. So by your definition it would be "opposing free and/or open principles" too, because the content under it is not in the public domain.
Point releases in Firefox did definitely include new functions on par or bigger than current "major" versions do. Firefox 3.5 included multimedia tags, private browsing, several new web technologies (workers, JSON)... Firefox 3.6 included the Personas interface and checking old plugins.
Firefox 16 is not 'mayor' in the same way that 3.0 or 4.0 were. The new numbering schema means that the version number does no longer provide significant information about the project evolution.
If there was absolutely no copyright or patents, the moment someone low in the food chain comes up with something, he can't do anything with it without risking losing it forever. What the hell incentive does he have to anything with it?
Exactly the same incentives that people had to create in the thousands of years before copyright and patents existed? "Intellectual property" doesn't protect the author of creative works, who may very well create it and keep it secret or limited to a small audience. The advances in arts and skills were kept to the small circle of one's guild so that it wouldn't be copied by competition, and industrial espionage was what advanced industries as a whole.
The argument that stopping IP will stop creativity because it won't protect the author is fallacious. Authors have many ways to benefit from their work other than selling copies, even when technology allows copies to be made for free. The only purpose of IP laws should be to benefit society at large so that new content is shared by default, instead of hidden under secrecy and benefit only the authors. The current IP rules that avoid the possibility of freely sharing content once it has been made available to the public, that is what makes no goddamn sense.
They know they believe in an Omnipotent God. They have no need to defend Him. (...) That tells me all I need to know about the "equivalence" between Islam and Christianity.
Yeah, because at no point in history Christianity has killed people because of blasphemy and heresy.</sarcasm>
If any, it only says about their relative grade of maturity as somewhat civilized religions, and the long due need for a renaissance in Islam. Which won't happen if people trying to make it happen get ridiculed over and over.
You wouldn't use a Turing machine to model the minimum energy need of calculations, as they are woefully inefficient; in the same way that you wouldn't model addition representing the naturals through the Successor function.
The Turing machine was (is) a reasonably good tool to create proofs for the existence (or nonexistence) of computations, as it provides a quite simple and general computation model, easy to work symbolically with. But near the minimum use of resources, it isn't.
The problem is when the "links right in the intro" form a loop and none of the articles gives a sensible explanation of the field, only unintuitive formal definitions with no practical application.
There *îs* a card for changing the colors in the text, and the guy's using it (and a second one to change creature type). The card modification is thus done according to the rules.
In fact, almost any magic effect in MtG is a change in the initial rules, so that's Magic for you
Maybe you can't "learn abstract mathematical ideas" from intuitive descriptions, but 99% of the public don't need to explore all the implications of mathematical ideas. Frankly, the attitude that "everybody should know as much of my art as I do" is quite elitist.
Intuitive descriptions will help the rest of us to a) communicate with the expert who actually understand the implications and b) apply them to real life problems without the need to have a whole understanding. People consulting an encyclopedia don't want full understanding, otherwise they'd be looking a course instead.
What a Wikipedia mathematical article should contain is: 1- who developed the concept, when it happened, and to which problems it was applied at first. 2- in what fields it is applied nowadays, and what benefits it provides. 3- basic intuitive explanations. 4- links to references with the mathematical formal definitions.
You know, encyclopedic content. Unfortunately, few people writing mathematical articles at Wikipedia want to develop them for a *general* public as they're supposed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Keeping tight control is a *good* think in user interface design strategy; it provides a more focused structure and simpler environment, which were their goals.
The mistake the Gnome developers made was calling the new desktop "Gnome 3". Had they presented it as an experimental new environment and named it "Project Harmony" or "Desktop Zen", or something like that, they would have stepped on less toes and met less resistance to the radical changes, and people would have seen it in better light.
Of course they would have had less audience, as distros wouldn't have adopted it so quickly. That trade-off was their choice, but I think "Linux is awesome! There are three good major desktops now!" was a better selling point than "They've updated Gnome, and it sucks".
And any submission that includes references to the Turing Test must have me!!!! :-P
Constraint satisfaction begs to differ.
Did you miss the "as little burden on their consciousness as possible" part?
That's what they said twenty years after Gutenberg invented the movable type. Of course the printing press was perfect by then, there wasn't any possibility for improvement, technology hasn't advanced at all since, and books were as easy to handle then as they're now. So there's no excuse for anybody that didn't know how to read, and they should be blamed for not taking advantage of that brand new technology.
Or maybe computing technology is primitive and hard to use, and it requires years of professional training to understand?
(...I wonder where the impression that nerds are arrogant comes from?)
Only if the price to entry is low. If it's high, the unregulated market itself would prevent competition
So you're suggesting that tablet computers are not for serious computing? Outrageous! So, maybe we should relegate them to be used for, say, amateur usage by non-experts?
GPL or CC-BY-SA content is not safe from DMCA takedown notices either. I don't see how that's relevant.
How come? The rights holder can't control non-commercial use after he has released it. So it's "open for non-commercial use".
There is not *one* definition of open and free, the BSD-GPL license wars prove it. Sure -NC is less open than those, but it isn't necessarily closed either.
That assumes there's a major candidate that is near to their interests.
Most users I know use the "hunt and peck" technique and are unable to touch-type, so they will never be able to match the typing speed achieved on a keyboard, even with a physical keyboard. A tablet virtual keyboard thus proves no disadvantage to them.
Yes, it's legally equivalent to shareware and freeware; it's unclear whether it can be used for self-promotion where the content is not distributed for money, only for publicity; and it doesn't allow for building a corpus of open content like a fully open license would do.
However, CC-*-NC licenses allow for unlimited amateur work and redistribution, which is a step above what standard copyright allows even under free use terms. Given the "web 2.0" model of distributed content generation, that end-users can reuse the content without legal worries is a win toward freedom even if it doesn't go the extra mile and only some users can benefit from it.
No, they aren't.
Seriously, I thought you should be able to defend the free/open principles with a less shallow argument than that. See my post below. Defending open content is not a binary proposition but more like a continuum; and CC-NC-SA falls inside that continuum nearer to "open" than "close".
It really depends on how you define freedom and openness. I'd say the CC-NC-SA is quite apt for the goals it promotes - that small content creators release their work to be shared and reused throughout the Internet "informal" channels.
That it doesn't offer full doesn't make it opposing open principles, it just offers a less permissive version of them; that's still promoting openness in my book. As you say, the GPL itself includes some restrictions, and even then it's held as the definition of "free and open" for many of us.
Heck, even the MIT license places restrictions on what you an do (you cannot use the names of the copyright holders, you have to copy the license notice in all versions, etc), and therefore is not "free as in freedom"; there are still things you aren't allowed to do with MIT-licensed content. So by your definition it would be "opposing free and/or open principles" too, because the content under it is not in the public domain.
How is releasing content under CC-NC-SA 3.0 license opposing free and/or open principles?
Point releases in Firefox did definitely include new functions on par or bigger than current "major" versions do. Firefox 3.5 included multimedia tags, private browsing, several new web technologies (workers, JSON)... Firefox 3.6 included the Personas interface and checking old plugins.
Firefox 16 is not 'mayor' in the same way that 3.0 or 4.0 were. The new numbering schema means that the version number does no longer provide significant information about the project evolution.
I think of it as version 4.16, and everything makes sense again.
No, but it matters while we are still alive. That's the essence of everything we can think of.
Think Logically
The great thing is, this XKCD strip is relevant to all Slashdot inflammatory threads!
Exactly the same incentives that people had to create in the thousands of years before copyright and patents existed? "Intellectual property" doesn't protect the author of creative works, who may very well create it and keep it secret or limited to a small audience. The advances in arts and skills were kept to the small circle of one's guild so that it wouldn't be copied by competition, and industrial espionage was what advanced industries as a whole.
The argument that stopping IP will stop creativity because it won't protect the author is fallacious. Authors have many ways to benefit from their work other than selling copies, even when technology allows copies to be made for free. The only purpose of IP laws should be to benefit society at large so that new content is shared by default, instead of hidden under secrecy and benefit only the authors. The current IP rules that avoid the possibility of freely sharing content once it has been made available to the public, that is what makes no goddamn sense.
Yeah, because at no point in history Christianity has killed people because of blasphemy and heresy.</sarcasm>
If any, it only says about their relative grade of maturity as somewhat civilized religions, and the long due need for a renaissance in Islam. Which won't happen if people trying to make it happen get ridiculed over and over.
You wouldn't use a Turing machine to model the minimum energy need of calculations, as they are woefully inefficient; in the same way that you wouldn't model addition representing the naturals through the Successor function.
The Turing machine was (is) a reasonably good tool to create proofs for the existence (or nonexistence) of computations, as it provides a quite simple and general computation model, easy to work symbolically with. But near the minimum use of resources, it isn't.
The problem is when the "links right in the intro" form a loop and none of the articles gives a sensible explanation of the field, only unintuitive formal definitions with no practical application.
I don't know about you, but today I feel powerful.
There *îs* a card for changing the colors in the text, and the guy's using it (and a second one to change creature type). The card modification is thus done according to the rules.
In fact, almost any magic effect in MtG is a change in the initial rules, so that's Magic for you
Maybe you can't "learn abstract mathematical ideas" from intuitive descriptions, but 99% of the public don't need to explore all the implications of mathematical ideas. Frankly, the attitude that "everybody should know as much of my art as I do" is quite elitist.
Intuitive descriptions will help the rest of us to a) communicate with the expert who actually understand the implications and b) apply them to real life problems without the need to have a whole understanding. People consulting an encyclopedia don't want full understanding, otherwise they'd be looking a course instead.
What a Wikipedia mathematical article should contain is:
1- who developed the concept, when it happened, and to which problems it was applied at first.
2- in what fields it is applied nowadays, and what benefits it provides.
3- basic intuitive explanations.
4- links to references with the mathematical formal definitions.
You know, encyclopedic content. Unfortunately, few people writing mathematical articles at Wikipedia want to develop them for a *general* public as they're supposed to be.